A Traveler’s Needs
It’s one of the most intriguing director-star pairings in world cinema: Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo and French icon Isabelle Huppert. This is their third film together, after In Another Country (from 2012) and Claire’s Camera, six years later; it is another witty, elusive, airy vignette, talky and musingly cerebral in the manner of Rohmer or Resnais. Huppert is a woman in Seoul making a living teaching French and perplexing her students (and the audience) with the question of who she is and what she is doing there.
Joy
The story of the world’s first test tube baby, Louise Brown (middle name: Joy), born 1978, is told in this movie. Bill Nighy stars as pioneering obstetrician Patrick Steptoe; James Norton is physiologist Robert Edwards and Thomasin McKenzie is the embryologist Jean Purdy. This amazing trio saw their work derided as far-fetched, attacked as unnatural – then praised as world-beating British achievement.
Maria
Angelina Jolie brings all her screen presence and superstar firepower to the role of Maria Callas, in retirement in Paris in the 1970s. Steven Knight has written the screenplay and Pablo Larraín directs, effectively completing a trilogy of movies about complex women, after Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy and Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana.
All We Imagine As Light
This wonderful film is from Indian director Payal Kapadia, a fluent, heartfelt Mumbai-set drama recalling the work of Satyajit Ray. It is the story of three nurses who have each come to the big city from smaller home towns; there is generational and sexual tension, worries about status, money, security – and the search for happiness and love.
Hard Truths
As fierce and uncompromising as ever, Mike Leigh has made a stark, plain film about depression in which he is reunited with the superlative Marianne Jean-Baptiste. She gives a powerful performance as Pansy, whose swallowed despair has morphed into anger at the world, and a very occasional mordant, vinegary humour; her melancholy exists in a kind of dysfunctional family ecosystem with the perennial sunny happiness of her sister.
April
A viscerally powerful, challenging and disturbing film from Georgian film-maker Dea Kulumbegashvili. Nina is an obstetrician under investigation for having mishandled a delivery which resulted in a baby’s death; she is also well known for carrying out illicit abortions for desperate women and now she is suspected by the grieving father of having covertly decided to save them the burden of another mouth to feed. The stress of the inquiry lays bare Nina’s private agony and sexual dysfunction and the film is haunted by visions of a strange ghost or golem.
The Room Next Door
At the age of 75, the great Spanish master Pedro Almodóvar finally got a major European prize this summer when he won the Venice Golden Lion for this, his English language feature debut. It’s a complex, painful interaction: a garlanded war correspondent (Tilda Swinton), in a moment of crisis, reaches out to someone she hasn’t seen in years (Julianne Moore). This is someone more than an acquaintance but not quite a friend, and yet this strange encounter might elevate their connection to something more.
On Falling
Feature first-timer Laura Carreira is a Portuguese director whose powerful film is about the human cost of the online retail revolution: what we rely on every time we order a super-swift online delivery. Aurora is a young woman working in the ironically named “fulfilment centre”, and driven to the edge of desperation.
Blitz
The story or “myth” of the wartime London blitz is often about chirpy working-class cockneys uncomplainingly enduring danger and tragedy, on the grounds that they and the posh folk were all in it together, putting the kettle on as Adolf’s bombs rained down. Steve McQueen’s film – the festival’s opening gala – promises to take a more complicated view. Saoirse Ronan plays a woman who is distraught as her son goes missing in the chaos.
Vermiglio
There is some wonderful storytelling here from Maura Delpero in a beautiful, poignant story of a remote Italian village community at the end of the second world war; it is a richly compassionate, emotional and detailed drama of family secrets. In a village in the chilly Alps, the local schoolteacher’s eldest daughter falls in love with a deserter who is being secretly looked after there.
Nickel Boys
One of the most visually thrilling, exaltingly beautiful films of the year, shot from the point-of-view of its two principals. RaMell Ross gave us an impressive documentary about African American experience with Hale County This Morning, This Evening; now he has taken on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel based on true testimonies. Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson play Elwood and Turner, two teenage boys sent to a notorious reform school in 60s Florida where abuse was normal, and where they find their destinies entwined.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Zambian-Welsh director Rungano Nyoni brings another mysterious and intense excursion into a surreally strange world. While driving one night, a woman in an exotic sci-fi costume pumps her brakes, gets out of the car and looks at a corpse by the side of the road; the dead man’s identity is all too familiar to her and the ensuing drama is about the rituals and collective behaviours with which families manage painful memories.
